Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has said he will have to set out plans to balance the Government’s books within the next few months.

Mr Darling said that dealing with the UK’s public deficit would have to involve an increase in the tax burden as well as “much tighter public spending”, and promised to spell out how he intended to rein back spending in his Pre-Budget Report this autumn.

Chancellor Alistair Darling warned there would be tighter public spending

His comments appear to mark a shift in strategy for the upcoming general election, moving the party away from the “Labour spending versus Tory cuts” approach previously favoured by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Mr Darling steered clear of using the term “cuts” and insisted that balancing the books would not mean plunging Britain into “some sort of Dark Age”.

But he said it was necessary to “level” with the public about the scale of discipline required to pay off the debts run up as the Government boosted spending and reduced tax in an effort to help the UK find its way out of recession. And he indicated that the process must begin once recovery was under way – something which he predicts will come around the turn of the year.

Mr Darling told a national newspaper: “As there is less uncertainty you can decide what your priorities are. This doesn’t mean you are going into some sort of Dark Age but we will have to decide, given what’s happened to the economy, how much we think we can afford to spend on services, how much we should be devoting to making sure we recover our fiscal position.

“That’s a judgment that I’m going to have to make at the Pre-Budget Report in the autumn.”

He added: “Once you start getting into recovery, then that is the time when you have to say, ‘Now we need to start doing something about the deficit’.

“When you look at the burden of where the deficit reduction comes from, it is tax, yes, but it is also having much tighter public spending.”

Rejecting calls to extend the temporary 2.5% reduction in VAT, which is due to be reversed at the end of the year, he added: “We have to be resolute that we can live within our means in the medium term.”